As usual, I started my day perusing hundreds RSS subscription (I used to use Outlook for this, but I am getting to like Google Reader more and more).

Lots of neat stuffs you can find just reading other people's writing.

For example:

http://thewpfblog.com/?p=92 (Talking Anna WPF application)

Funny thing is, although not as fancy as this WPF app, I was playing around with Vista Speech Synthesizer in .NET about a couple of weeks before and created the following console application in VS2005 and Windows SDK for Vista (you need to reference System.Speech.dll for this to work):

using System;
using System.Speech.Synthesis; 

namespace SpeechTest
{
    class Program
    {
        static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            using (SpeechSynthesizer ss = new SpeechSynthesizer())
            {
                while(true)
                {
                    Console.Write("Enter what you want me to say:");
                    string s = Console.ReadLine();
                    if (s.Trim().Equals(string.Empty))
                        return;
                    ss.SpeakText(s);
                }
            }
        }
    }
} 

Which work just fine minus all the fancy stuffs in Talking Anna.

To read more about this, you can peruse this MSDN magazine article.

http://www.researchchannel.org/prog/displayevent.aspx?rID=11087&fID=2740 (Designing .NET Class Libraries)

It feels good when what you are doing get confirmed by one of the experts like Krzysztof. He was talking about how to design class library (in this case .NET Framework itself) and how Microsoft staffs would write a sample code first on how the code would look like before even going to the case tools for diagramming, etc. I've been doing this sort of thing as long as I can remember when designing my own class library.